Interwar Britain

Interwar Britain was a period of British history which lasted from the end of World War I on 11 November 1918 to the start of World War II on 1 September 1939. The Interwar period was a period of peace and economic stagnation, and it coincided with the downfall of the Liberal Party, the Great Depression (known as the "Great Slump" in Britain), and the rise of the Labour Party as the main opposition to the Conservative Party.

Background
Britain entered World War I with the sole declared aim of protecting Belgian independence; other aims later appeared. In the first two years of the war, various secret agreements were made with Britain's allies that would, for example, have allowed Tsarist Russia to annex Constantinople from Turkey. Partly through pressure from the United States, Britain later evolved more idealistic war aims. In January 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George denied that Britain was fighting a "war of aggression", embraced the cause of self-government for the Poles and the Slav peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and committed Britain to support founding an "international organization" which wold be "an alternative to war." This became the League of Nations. Fighting a general election in December 1918, however, Lloyd George felt the need to appeal to popular hostility against Germany. Supporters of his Liberal-Conservative coalition reacted favorably to slogans such as "Hang the Kaiser" and "Make the Germans Pay". On a tide of aggressive patriotism, the coalition won a crushing majority in Parliament, taking 475 seats.

History
Although the armistice of 11 November 1918 ended the fighting in World War I, it did not end the war. A conference was convened to meet in Paris, where the victorious powers determined the peace terms to be presented to Germany. Also on their agenda were issues arising from the collapse of the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. Meanwhile, Britain maintained its naval blockade of Germany. When the peacemakers met in 1919, Britain's Lloyd George balanced teh cynical realism of France's Georges Clemenceau with the lofty idealism of US President Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George supported Wilson's pet scheme for an international organization to maintain peace, the League of Nations, and also attempted to mderate Clemenceau's demands on Germany. Britain and France agreed, in demanding reparations payments from the Germans, to cover the immense cost of the war, which had put both countries heavily in debt. Protesting, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. It severely restricted German armed forces, put the Rhineland under Allied military occupation for 15 years, imposed unspecified reparations payments, and declared Germany guilty of having casued the war. German reaction was swift: sailors of the German High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, under the armistice agreement, scuttled their warships in protest. The British intellectual elite soon turned against the peace agreement. Economist John Maynard Keynes' 1919 best-seller, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, helped generate a widespread impression in Britain that the Germans had been unfairly treated.

Britain's troubles
Conflict rather than peace was the keynote of both domestic and foreign affairs in the immediate aftermath of the war. In 1919, British forces were in action from Afghanistan to Arkhangelsk, where they briefly intervened against the Bolshevik government in the Russian Civil War. Ireland was in revolt, and in Britain trouble also flared. Demobilization of the wartime armed forces proceeded too slowly. Thousands of soldiers eager to return to civilian life demonstrated in central London in early 1919. Protests by Canadian troops at Rhyl, in North Wales, wer suppressed violently. When they eventually returned to their homes and families, the ex-servicemen faced an uncertain world.

Industrial disputes proliferated. In January 1919, Glaswegian workers inspired by the Bolshevik revolution led a strike on "Red Clydeside" that had to be suppressed by troops. The army was also called in when a police strike in Liverpool unleashed rioting in August 1919. Further strikes were provoked when the railways and mines, nationalized during the war, were returned to private ownership against the wishes of their workers. At the 1918 general election, Lloyd George promised to build "a fit country for heroes to live in". His government tried to respond to discontent and reward wartime loyalty. Unemployment benefit was extended and council housing accorded a priority. However, a brief postwar economic boom soon collapsed and by 1921, there were 2 million workers without jobs. The era of mass unemployment had begun in Britain. The British had won the war, but it did not feel like a victory.

Aftermath
With a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals in government from 1918, the Labour Party was able to establish itself as the leading opposition force in Parliament. Postwar discontent fuelled support for Labour, which won 142 seats in Parliament in 1922 and 191 seats in 1923. This was enough for Ramsay MacDonald to finally form the first of two minority Labour governments in the 1920s, although the first lasted less than 10 months. The Liberal Party was reduced to a third-party status and Lloyd George's political career went into decline. The Labour Party condemned the Versailles treaty in 1919 and remained strongly pacifist throughout the 1920s and 1930s.